“In the reign of Edward VI, besides other most severe persecutions which he carried on against Gospellers, Anabaptists, and other sectaries, amongst whom two at least were Sacramentarians, he was the active promoter and immediate cause of the burning of Joan Knell, {657b} and George Paris or Van Parr, {657c} for certain singular opinions. Amongst those who escaped with their lives, a great part of them were forced to recant, through the fear of torments, and to carry lighted tapers and faggots, in testimony of their having merited burning. {658a} As to the fate of Joan Knell, or Butcher, commonly called Joan of Kent, (and whose innocent blood was evidently shed by the procurement of Cranmer,) Dr. Milner thinks that when it is considered with all its attendant circumstances, a more cruel and wanton act of persecution (he might have said _murder_,) is not to be found upon record. {658b} “The doctrine for which she suffered (he adds) was of an abstract nature, not calculated to gain proselytes or to occasion any public disturbances. She was barely accused of maintaining, that “Christ passed through the blessed Virgin’s body as water through a conduit, without participating of that body through which he passed.” {659a} For no other cause than persisting in this opinion, she was convented in the church of St. Paul, before archbishop Cranmer and his assistants, convicted and delivered over to the secular arm. We have the sentence that he pronounced on the occasion, which is rigorous beyond the usual terms; and we have a certificate of it, addressed to the king, in which instead of petitioning for mercy, in the usual style of such instruments, the convict heretic is expressly recommended “to receive due punishment.” Nor is this all, for the royal youth being unwilling to sign the warrant for her execution, Cranmer employs all his theological arguments to induce him to comply; amongst other things telling him that “princes, being God’s deputies, ought to punish impieties against God.” In the end Edward sets his hand to the warrant, but with tears in his eyes, telling Cranmer, that “if he did wrong, he (the said Cranmer) should answer for it to God.” At length, by a change in circumstances, the archbishop himself being condemned as a heretic to suffer that cruel death, to which he had condemned so many others on the same account, “he was far from imitating the firmness of the greater part of them.” {659b}